Racializing Recycling
Environmental Politics of White Expatriates in Postcolonial Singapore
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7472013 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kakoli Banerjee (0000-0001-9525-9805, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) Singapore & Jadavpur University Kolkata India), Kamalika Banerjee (Jadavpur University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 58 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Publication date | 2026-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Antipode (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0066-4812 • E-ISSN: 1467-8330 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/anti.70137 |
| OpenAlex | W7129731873 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 51 |
This paper examines how European expatriates in Singapore assert white supremacy through a sense of environmental superiority when comparing local recycling practices with those of their home countries. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I show how white expatriates deploy recycling to racialize Singaporean waste practices, depicting it as (i) a throwaway society where residents handle waste irresponsibly, (ii) a place with primitive infrastructure that must be civilized, and (iii) a society lacking environmental awareness. Bringing critical race theory into dialogue with discard studies, I shift attention from proximity to waste as producing marginality to the racialization of distanced waste handling, showing how ideas of dirt and waste generate new forms of race‐making in postcolonial contexts. I further argue that the racialization is a product of white environmentality's encounter with postcolonial difference, and that the framework of “authoritarian environmentalism” fails to capture the complexity of contamination of household recycling in Singapore
Dirt · Environmental justice · Environmental politics · Ethnography · Politics · Race (biology · Racialization · White (mutation · Environmental Education and Sustainability · Municipal Solid Waste Management · Socioeconomic Development in Asia
Purity and Danger
Economies of Recycling
Bad Environmentalism
Hong Kong
Discard Studies
Environmentality and Green Governmentality
The Ideological Condition
Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore
Ideologies of the Raj
Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance
Habeas Viscus
Common Misconceptions about Recycling
Races without Racism
Color-Blind Racism in Pandemic Times
Expatriate as a ‘Good’ Migrant
Multiethnicity in multicultural Singapore
Is it racism? The belief in cultural superiority across Europe
Policing the poor’ and ‘poor policing’ in a global city
Perceptions of Meritocracy in Singapore
The Potential of Large-Scale Urban Waste Recycling
Geographies of race and ethnicity 1
Towards geographies of privileged migration
Garbage matters
When planetary cosmopolitanism meets the Buddhist ethic
Pollution Is Colonialism
On Environmentality
Interrogating the circular economy
Programming Environments
Producing migrant encounter
Crap on the map, or postcolonial waste
The diversity of divestment in Singapore
Governing as gardening
Work, Identity and Change? Post/Colonial Encounters in Hong Kong
Examining 'Expatriate' Continuities
Postcolonial Possibilities for the Sociology of Race
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |